5of5Mayor Ivy Taylor at the Breakfast Taco Summit with Mariachi Los Galleros from San Antonio. With an exchange of tacos and the signing of a proclamation, the mayors of San Antonio and Austin proclaimed an end to the Texas Taco War of 2016 on March 10, 2016.Photo: Edmund Tijerina /San Antonio Express-News

In San Antonio, we’ve had streets with a taquería on every corner long before that possibility became the most delicious political epithet of 2016. So in honor of that tradition, today, the Express-News begins a yearlong celebration of something San Antonio does best. Welcome to 365 Days of Tacos.

I’ll cover a taquería a day, because San Antonians take their tacos as seriously as their city’s heritage, something we learned from the Texas Taco War in early 2016. In that war, started by a New York writer who insinuated that Austin was the spiritual home of the breakfast taco, insults flew up and down the interstate until the mayors of both cities signed a peace accord.

But history teaches us that to have peace, we must prepare for war. And I like my war on a homemade tortilla.

So how will 365 Days of Tacos work? I’ll hit seven taquerías (small mom-and-pops, bigger restaurants and even trucks) a week and the reports will run every day exclusively on our subscriber website, ExpressNews.com/Tacos.

I’ll cover the essentials. The tacos, of course, but also tortillas and the questions of flour versus corn, homemade versus store-bought. And salsa, because they take red and green and shades in-between seriously around here.

Each report will feature an overall rating:

“Worth a drive” is a place that merits a special visit.

“A solid neighborhood option” might not deserve a drive across town, but it’s a spot that respectably serves its neighborhood — like many of this city’s places.

“Once was enough:” This one explains itself.

As a New Year’s bonus to launch the series, turn to the Taste section today for the first day of 365 Days of Tacos, a trip to Ray’s Drive Inn for the mother of all puffy tacos.

San Antonio’s the perfect city for a year’s worth of tacos. They form such a part of the city’s history and food culture, kids here remember going to school with tacos instead of peanut butter and jelly. And because some even suffered a kind of culinary bigotry over it, they turned taco into a badge of honor.

No matter what the small-plate, farm-to-table, artisan-crafted restaurant movements bring to San Antonio, the moms-and-pops are still the bedrock of breakfast, lunch and late-night comfort food, and it’s time we recognized them. This series is a step in that direction.

Whatever heavy cultural lifting comes along with a year of eating tacos, it’s still a year of getting paid to eat tacos. In San Antonio. Envy me or pity, but either way, my job can beat up your job and take its lunch money.

I’ve done a yearlong taco project before, in Austin. I tried more than 1,600 tacos from 365 places in 2015, learned a journeyman’s vocabulary of restaurant Spanish, got cursed at with many of those same words, drove into the middle of a tax raid and actually lost 10 pounds in the process.

(I lost weight because at their core, tacos are lean, efficient fuel: a light carbohydrate shell wrapped around proteins like eggs, cheese, carnitas, carne asada, barbacoa and tripas. The danger to your weight comes from the chips, queso, beer, full-sugar soda and quart-sized aguas frescas that come with the territory. You have to say no sometimes, and “no” is the same in Spanish and English.)

Because of that project and my job at the Express-News, the Austin Chronicle called me “Best Referee in the Taco Wars.” My salvo in that war? A Twitter post wishing I could do the same series in San Antonio.

Mike Sutter is the restaurant critic and a food writer for the Express-News. Before joining the Taste team in 2016, he was a restaurant critic, editor and designer at the Austin American-Statesman and editor of the website FedManWalking.com. He’s been a guest on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered,” Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street Radio, the Cooking Channel’s “Eat Street” and KUT’s “Field and Feast.” His work has appeared on BonAppetit.com and in The Guardian. He’s won national awards for criticism and design from the Society for Features Journalism, the National Headliner Awards and the Society for News Design. Among the things he’s expensed for work: A Ouija board, a live chicken and plastic army men.